Teeth grinding at night

For a long time, Mr. K. didn’t realize he was grinding his teeth at night. He found out from his partner, who eventually brought it up with him. The noise was unmistakable. During the day, he only felt the consequences: a stiff jaw in the morning, occasional tension headaches, and—as he initially thought—unrelated to that—persistent neck pain.

Bruxism—the medical term for teeth grinding and clenching that occurs at night or even during the day—affects far more people than one might expect. It is rarely an isolated problem. Most often, it is linked to mental stress, an overstimulated nervous system, and muscular tension that releases itself at night because it has no outlet during the day.

The tricky thing about bruxism is that it happens unconsciously. No one actively chooses to clench their teeth together with enormous force at night. The body does it anyway—sometimes with a force many times greater than normal chewing pressure. This constant tension affects not only the chewing muscles but often radiates through muscular connections all the way to the neck.

In physical therapy, we can’t “stop” bruxism—but we can significantly alleviate its effects. This includes manual techniques to relax overworked chewing and neck muscles, targeted exercises to improve awareness of tension in the jaw, and, when appropriate, collaboration with dental colleagues.

Equally important is looking at the big picture: How much stress is someone currently carrying? What is the quality of their sleep like? Are there ways to consciously release tension during the day before it builds up at night? For me, these questions are just as much a part of treatment as the manual work on the jaw itself.

Mr. K. probably still grinds his teeth occasionally. But his neck pain has decreased significantly since we began treating the overall picture rather than just the individual symptom. Sometimes the solution to a problem in the neck actually lies in the jaw and in what happens at night without us even realizing it.